MORE DIFFERENT THAN NOT:DIVERGENCE OF VALUES IN UKRAINE's AND RUSSIA's SOCIETIES AMIDSTTHE FULL-SCALE INVASIONine’s and Russia’s Societies amidst the Full-Scale Invasion

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which started on February 2022 and had been preceded by years of more limited warfare, has again brought to the fore the question of a civilisational split between the two countries. While Ukrainians have clearly opted for European and Euro-Atlantic integration, Russians have repeatedly sought to assert their influence over the former Soviet countries—Ukraine included—denying their right to freely choose their alliances and creating their own version of ‘civilisation’ rooted in Orthodox Christianity and the Russian language. While, by all appearances, the difference between the two could not be any starker, various myths and analyses have persisted portraying Russia and Ukraine as ‘one people’ or culturally approximate societies. The paper seeks to elucidate one aspect of such thinking, by exploring values—a vague concept which is at the same time instrumental in self-identities and orientations of political actors—as they are manifested in Ukrainian and Russian societies. It looks at different approaches to defining values, particularly in the (geo)political context of Russian aggression against Ukraine, and explores their dynamics in both countries following the events of February 2022. While there is little relevant sociological data, discourses, official statement, and context analysis is employed to show that the divergence of values between Ukrainian and Russian societies seems to be growing unalterably, with Ukraine manifesting European values and portraying its fight against Russian aggression as an existential conflict for the entire European project and Russia propounding its constructed myths of the ‘Russian world’, a loosely defined community of Russian-speaking people, and ‘traditional values’ as juxtaposed to Western and European ones in an attempt to court non-Western countries. This bears implications for the entire international system as it splits into two blocs regarding on whose side is taken in the global confrontation between democracy and autocracy.